Hello everybody!
This month of coding on RetroShare has been very productive again, with many user experience improvements and bug fixes to the mobile app.
The user can now pick it’s own avatar in an integrated manner. On Android when the user attempt to change her avatar she is directly prompted to select between the available image sources like the gallery or the camera as you can see in the screenshot.
To implement it I had to write some part of the code using Android Java API to create an intent with a chooser, and then handle the answer. After that, using Qt the image is encoded in PNG format and then
to Base64 to handle it to the retroshare JSON API.
Moreover avatars are now cached so the can now be showed the avatars in the contacts view without high resource consumption.
Another improvement is the Unicode emoji input support, adapted from the QMLemoji project, that uses the default system unicode icons.
This enable the user to use emojis whitout heavy and tricky text substitution and extra image bundling.
For platforms where Unicode emoji are not supported yet we plan to just ship a font with Unicode emoji support so the user experience will be coherent accross platforms.
Some more examples of improvements happened this month: chat bubbles now recognizes links and if clicked they are handled to the system with that will open the proper application depending on the URI schema, buttons are now styled and supports icons, importing and exporting of trusted nodes public key is more integratend with the system and more intuitive.
In a separated branch on my repository I have implemented showing to the user the tunnel connection status, but after talking with my mentors, we decided to not merge it yet at least until the new chat system backend is ready because having this now would provide partial information that may confuse the user in some cases.
As always you can get/comment/contribute to the code and followe the discussions on my public Gitlab repo.